The Aztec Sun God's Three-Gram Heir
A Ruby-throated Hummingbird weighs about three grams, less than a US nickel. Some of them cross the Gulf of Mexico in a single nonstop flight, twenty hours over open water, after doubling their body weight in fat.
A Three-Gram Crossing
Many ruby-throats winter from southern Mexico to Panama, then come back north each spring. Birds of the World puts the Gulf round-trip at more than 1,600 kilometres of open water. Individuals fatten on nectar and insects until they have effectively two birds’ worth of weight, then burn the entire fat reserve in roughly twenty hours of nonstop flight. There are no rest stops.
The metabolism that makes this possible is its own kind of extreme. Heart rates climb past 1,200 beats per minute in the air. Oxygen demand per gram during flight runs about ten times the rate measured in elite human athletes. On cool nights they switch the whole engine off and drop into a torpor so dense the bird looks dead until it isn’t.
Named for a Brawler
The genus is Archilochus, named in 1854 by Ludwig Reichenbach for a 7th-century BC Greek poet from the island of Paros. Archilochus the man wrote sharp iambic invective and fought as a soldier. One famous surviving fragment shrugs off the loss of a shield in battle: he can always get another. Reichenbach picked a warrior-poet for a bird most people picture sipping at a feeder.
He had the bird’s measure. John James Audubon, twenty-three years earlier, opened his ruby-throat chapter calling it “this glittering fragment of the rainbow.” A few pages on he noted that the male “even dares to give chase to the Tyrant Fly-catcher, hurries the blue-Bird and the Martin to their boxes.” The species, he wrote, is quarrelsome and prone to aerial fights with rivals.
The Aztecs had already worked it out. Their war-and-sun god Huitzilopochtli carries a name that resolves into huītzilin (hummingbird) and ōpōchtli (left-handed). Warriors killed in battle (and women who died in childbirth), the Florentine Codex says, were transformed into hummingbirds and joined him in the next world. The 16th-century friar Diego Durán passed on a parallel local observation: the bird “appears to be dead, but at the advent of spring… the little bird is reborn.”
The Tik-Tik Dive
Males fly a courtship display that doubles as fighter-pilot behaviour. They climb two to three metres above the female and dive past her, pulling up on the far side, again and again. The sound is mostly wings, a tight rapid tik-tik tik-tik tik-tik made by the wings as he passes the perched female. Their actual vocalisations are unimpressive: quick squeaky chirps used mostly to threaten other ruby-throats.
Field guides usually describe the ruby-throat in the same gentle sentence: jewel-like, sips at flowers. That is true for about four seconds at a time. The rest is fuel-loading and ocean crossings on a body that fits in a tablespoon. Greek poet and Aztec god both caught the same thing. This is not a delicate bird. It is a small, fast soldier with feathers.
Sources:
- Audubon, John James (1831): Ornithological Biography, Volume 1: Ruby-throated Humming Bird
- Wikipedia: Ruby-throated hummingbird
- Wikipedia: Archilochus (bird genus)
- Wikipedia: Archilochus (Greek poet)
- Wikipedia: Huitzilopochtli
- Encyclopædia Britannica: Ruby-throated Hummingbird
- Audubon Society Field Guide: Ruby-throated Hummingbird